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Click to enlargeCarte Particuliere d'une Partie d'Asie ou sont les Isles d'Andemaon, Ceylan, les Maldives
A regional chart of the Bay of Bengal islands — the Andamans, Ceylon and the Maldives — from the Atlas Nouveau, the sumptuously engraved Amsterdam edition of Alexis-Hubert Jaillot's French maps published by Pierre Mortier. It marks the point where French geography and Dutch engraving combine in the great commercial atlas.
Authorship and object
The map descends from Sanson via Jaillot (1632?–1712), whose folio Atlas Nouveau (Paris, from 1681) was reissued in Amsterdam by Pierre Mortier from 1692; this sheet is from Mortier's large 1707/08 edition of 168 maps, an issue noted for its lavish engraving and its multi-sheet "Théâtre de la Guerre" maps of the War of the Spanish Succession.
A regional focus
Rather than the whole subcontinent, the sheet zooms to a maritime sub-region — the island groups that governed navigation and trade across the Bay of Bengal — at a larger scale than the general maps, on the Sanson–Jaillot geographic base.
The gaze
The map embodies the early-eighteenth-century atlas trade itself: French geographic authority, Dutch commercial publishing, and a readership hungry for the wider trading world. India's surrounding seas are framed as a theatre of European commerce and navigation — the ocean approaches charted as carefully as the land.